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CONTENTS
Osama bin Laden: Early Life
Osama bin Laden: The Pan-Islamist Idea
Osama Bin Laden: Building Al-Qaida
Osama bin Laden: Worldwide Jihad
Osama bin Laden: “Public Enemy #1″
On May 1, 2011, American soldiers killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden at his
compound near Islamabad, Pakistan. Intelligence officials believe bin Laden was
responsible for many deadly acts of terrorism, including the 1998 bombings of the U.S.
Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the September 11, 2001 attacks on the
Pentagon and the World Trade Center. He had been on the FBI’s “most wanted” list for
more than a decade.
Did you know? Bin Laden’s body was evacuated from the Abbottabad compound by
helicopter and flown to an American aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean. The corpse was
buried at sea.
In 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan; soon afterward, Azzam and bin Laden
traveled to Peshawar, a Pakistani city on the border with Afghanistan, to join the
resistance. They did not become fighters themselves, but they used their extensive
connections to win financial and moral support for the mujahideen (the Afghan rebels).
They also encouraged young men to come from all over the Middle East to be a part of
the Afghan jihad. Their organization, called the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) served as a
global recruitment network–it had offices in places as far away as Brooklyn and Tucson,
Arizona–and provided the migrant soldiers, known as “Afghan Arabs,” with training and
supplies. Most important, it showed bin Laden and his associates that it was possible to
put pan-Islamism into practice.
Early the next year, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia for the more militantly Islamist Sudan.
After one more year of preparation, al-Qaida struck for the first time: A bomb exploded
in a hotel in Aden, Yemen, that had housed American troops on their way to a
peacekeeping mission in Somalia. (No Americans died in the blast, but two Austrian
tourists did.)
Even in the frenzy of the post-September 11 “global war on terror,” bin Laden eluded
capture. For almost ten years, he remained in hiding, issuing fatwas and taunts over
radio and television, recruiting enthusiastic young jihadis to his cause and plotting new
attacks. Meanwhile, the CIA and other intelligence officials searched in vain for his
hiding place.
Finally, in August 2010, they traced bin Laden to a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan,
about 35 miles from Islamabad. For months, CIA agents watched the house while
drones photographed it from the sky. Finally, it was time to move. On May 2, 2011 (May
1 in the United States), a team of Navy SEALs burst into the compound. They found the
al-Qaida leader in an upstairs bedroom with a pistol and an assault rifle nearby and shot
him in the head and chest, killing him instantly. “Justice,” said President Obama in a
televised address to the nation that night, “has been done.”